Can American liberalism rise from Washington’s two-bed brothel to dance with the ghost of Roy Orbison and eat garden tomatoes?
By Joe Bageant -- World News Trust
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Like all great fiction, it provides moments of comic relief, typically through irony. Thus, we watch the development of liberal political “strategy.” One has to laugh. Laugh first at the notion that the Hamptons Country Club leadership now designing “national strategy” could ever make working people getting poorer by the day ever believe in them for Christ sake. The people sitting around the Shenandoah this morning will never believe that a gaggle of cagey, sophisticated multi-millionaire party leaders being limoed from the Ritz Carlton to their appearance on Jon Stewart are somehow going to look out for the blood-smeared guys and gals down at the chicken plant. Or the blood-smeared guys in Iraq for that matter. It’s too late for that. They cannot raise the already dead. They are complicit in the same power poker game as the Republicans and they will remain that way, as my neighbor puts it: “Until the dumb motherfucking voters can see beyond the price of a gallon of gas.” Or the office basketball pool or the next staged election year non-issue. The real issues are always moral, usually involving purposeful neglect of some portion of society, which is supposed to be the Democratic arena.
Yet every honest candidate who dares mention such issues is deemed “too far left to be workable.” Then they are squashed like Ralph Nader or Dennis Kucinich, or the notion of kicking the insurance companies entirely out of our health care system and declaring universal health care as a citizen right like most civilized nations have done. And then, after having killed everyone around them but members of their country club, the national leadership comes back to us talking about “renewal.” And offers us brilliant ideas such as pulling out of Iraq three years and thousands of corpses too late.
Even being aware of the process is not much help. What we can do personally that would make the slightest difference? So we continue to let a political managerial expert class advise and run the only game in town, and contribute time and money to the very people who engineered liberal failure for the past 30 years. Academic “framers,” wonks and just plain bullshit artists hawking out-of touch candidates -- though there small signs of hope as we enjoy watching Joe the ho’ Lieberman finally strangle in his own stench. Nowhere was it more savored than amid the drooling political junkies of the blogosphere, that cyber-fiction of freedom where unhappy minions of the Empire rant about “strategies” instead of taking to the streets where the voters and potential voters are, particularly those very voters who damned well need what the Democrats once offered. Time was, when Democrats used to put money in the budget for older Americans and others for social programs -- at least enough for some goddamned bingo games and an occasional dance for the widowed and the lonely. Maybe we need to kidnap the leadership and force them to listen to Roy’s songs for twenty-four hours straight.
Then too, how can well meaning Democratic voters do anything, even if they were inclined to action? They are trapped in their cubicles doing the Empire’s most mundane tasks. So they settle for blogger world. (Ever notice how all the forums go completely dead at 5 p.m.) None of which currently matters because neither the bloggers nor the candidates are going to shake the dirty hands they most need to become politically relevant again. First they would have to convince some very fucked over people in this country who gave up long ago on politicians that they are sincere.
To even begin doing that they will need to be in neighborhoods like this one year round, year after year, and be there even when there is NOT an election coming up. Fuck the last-minute “canvassing” and the highly paid liberal influencers’ advice. Personally go help somebody Like Pauline or one of her grandkids. Then the people will understand. That is reality-based politics. The kind that puts real people together face to face with feet planted in the same dirt.
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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/content/view/64/331/lang,en/
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